Chapter Two
Footsteps, Heartbeat, Laughter: Sounds of Earth
I was in the room with you a whole six or seven minutes, but I couldn’t shake that encounter.
It was as if something moved in that wasn’t going to move out.
I told myself that this was ridiculous, because of course it would leave me.
With enough time, I’d forget it ever happened.
How much of your life do you really remember anyway?
Not much. And what you hold on to—even those memories are unreliable.
I always went on about how much I loved my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Carterett, until Addison, my best friend and some years my only friend, reminded me about the time I raised my hand to say that only the worker honeybee died after stinging.
After she was corrected like that, Mrs. Carterett said, You’re a little stinker, aren’t you?
and grabbed my arm hard enough to leave fleeting marks, like indentations in rising bread.
You have to be careful about embarrassing certain people.
And you didn’t tell your parents, Addison said, and then it all came back.
How I was sure that this would only lead to two equally drastic outcomes: my mother suggesting it would have been better to be quiet, my father going to school and making a scene.
My only option was to just be so good, it never happened again.
The point is, stuff faded, good and bad.
I was being silly, carrying around some sense that I was on the alert after meeting you, as if something was about to change in a major way.
I don’t even like change, but I felt a quiet excitement.
It wasn’t exactly love at first sight; it was more future at first sight.
Like I discovered a book of my life, already written, and opened it to find that, there you were, a main character.
I didn’t love you the moment I saw you, but I had a sense that I could, or would.
No dweeby boy in sexy jeans, of course. I wasn’t really expecting to find you.
It was just a way of staying in contact, same as playing our meeting over and over again in my mind.
Winnifred Evans said that retreating into a fantasy life is a way of avoiding real connection and escaping the overwhelming stress of real life, an understandable safe place, but a hiding place, and okay, okay.
Still…Why turn the best stuff into a shaky coping mechanism for some dark psychological need?
Daydreams, reading books, staring off into space, wishes, and imagination—why not let it just be the magic it is?
I didn’t tell her about the guy in her waiting room, and the space he was taking up in my head.
I already knew what she would say. This was hard to explain, even to you, but it was easier to have relationships and experiences in my imagination.
I wanted them badly, I did. I wanted to be one of those people with lots of friends around them, lots of activities they loved and were interested in, but that seemed so immense.
Scary-immense. Winnifred Evans would remind me that staying safe to the degree I required was a small, small room, while being in the world, trying new things, loving people, was a risk, but it was freedom.
Who needed freedom when you had your pj’s and some books?
Whatever, you know. Leave my coping mechanisms alone, I always wanted to say to her, but never did.
This, though. You—it was more than a relationship in my imagination.
I knew it. I just did. A once-in-a-lifetime alignment, same as they said about the Voyager mission.
Calculations done way back in the summer of 1965 predicted that a spacecraft launched in the late 1970s could visit all four of the major outer planets—Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus—the rarest of possibilities, occurring only once every 176 years. It was facts merging with fate.
After a few weeks of regular life, doubt crept in.
I did have an overactive imagination. Anyone with anxiety does.
It’s one of our finest and most problematic qualities.
No, it’s a skill, honed to an art form, and not just at the usual worrying hour of two a.m., either.
All hours. Each of us could be a writer or something, the way we make up stories and believe them.
Winnifred Evans was right that I was hiding from scary things by imagining great things, and imagining scary things so they couldn’t take me by surprise.
Hiding from people, maybe, most of all. Plus, when you have three older brothers, you develop a good imagination after all those hours in the farthest corner of the back seat, staring out the window and dreaming, just to remove yourself from their elbows and fighting and farting.
Finals were coming up, too. I needed the brain space you were taking up.
I had three AP classes (English, biology, calculus), plus US history, third-year Spanish, and ceramics (thank God), so my head was exploding.
I seriously didn’t even know what this was all for, if I was only going to get my AA degree like my brothers before working at Papa Angelo’s full-time.
My youngest brother, Maurice, who I was closest to, once told my father he wanted to be a musician, and things were thrown.
Now he was the front-of-house manager, even if I still occasionally saw him drumming with a set of knives or just his index fingers.
Besides finals, we were getting our yearbooks, another stressful end-of-school event.
It always felt awkward, those days of carrying it around, everyone hunched over each other’s pages, writing missives of love and importance.
I was too shy to ask anyone to sign mine, and it was hard to know what to write about a person I sat next to in history and barely talked to, but who still wanted my love and memories of stuff we’d already forgotten.
There was the end-of-year picnic, too, which had the same strain, only with hot dogs.
And then there was the junior prom. Me and Addison and Priya were going to go together.
We had our dresses and everything, but then Liam asked Addison, and Maddie asked Priya, and I decided not to go.
My dress was green satin, short but not too, so my dad wouldn’t freak out.
Now it hung like a broken promise in my closet, tauntingly shiny.
I wanted them to have fun, but maybe not without me. The dance part, not going—it was a relief in some ways. I didn’t like Liam, but maybe I was just jealous. Addison was acting all silly, and she wasn’t a silly person. Fun, yeah, really fun, but not silly.
Prom was on my mind, is all. It started working its way into my body, causing an alarm that something was wrong.
My stomach started to ache again, and my chest had that feeling like my heart was being wrung out, same as a wet washrag.
Maurice said he was going to take me to do something special on prom night instead, but the stuff Maurice liked…
I should prepare myself for a Mars Society meeting, you know.
His idea of special wasn’t necessarily the same as other people’s.
I was grateful, though. Maurice, with his glasses always knocked off-kilter. The best.
Probably, my head was just full of the same thing it always was. Overwhelming loneliness. A problem I was too afraid to fix.
What I’m saying is, I hadn’t forgotten about you so much as you were shoved out of my mind by what was required in the moment: enduring, mostly.
Maurice told me, One day your life will start, and I was still waiting.
It wouldn’t happen in high school, not for people like me, he said, which also meant people like him.
I wanted to ask him if his life had started, but I was maybe worried about the answer.
Well, then, you know what happened.
I parked on the gravel strip in front of the dock.
I opened the Velcro tab of the carrier and slid out the pizza.
I double-checked the sales slip. Extra-large Roma.
The bottom of the box was still warm, the steam softening the cardboard ever so slightly.
The Chevy Spark was a shit car, but I should have paid more attention—Eastlake was getting pretty strange lately.
I thought I’d be one minute, at the most.
I pushed through the wooden gates. Jogged down the steps.
Hunted for houseboat number…I checked the slip again.
Four. It was the tiny one that was second from the end.
I always felt a little nervous going onto the houseboat docks.
Residents only! the signs warned. I’d been invited (well, Papa Angelo’s had), but still.
I was one of those annoying rule-followers.
I’d better be, you know, with my dad. I annoyed even myself about it, though.
The houses—and that’s what they actually are, floating homes, not boats one would drive—bobbed and swayed a bit, even the large two-story ones.
It was evening, and the wind had picked up, the waters of the lake choppy.
Overhead, strings of lights arced charmingly.
At number six, a family jumped aboard a sailboat and headed away, the bow slapped by waves.
Number four looked a bit tired and worn.
The paint was fading, and the plants in the flower boxes overflowed with a mix of weeds.
Still, from the scratchy welcome mat (also worn—elco, it read) I could see across Lake Union, where the Space Needle rose in retro intergalactic dignity.